GameDev News for 15 December 2021

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Hey, everyone. Chatting about optimization recently prompted me to write a little rant about it. Nothing new, but the reminder is needed now and then.

In kinda-related news, Wireframe Magazine invites people to code their own landscape engine as pioneered by Mike Singleton in The Lords of Midnight. I already did that, thank you very much. Took me five years of on-and-off research, but the resulting engine became the basis of my best games so far. The article seems to describe a different technique from the one I found though.

Then we have a couple of articles on game design:

And going back to game history for a bit:

  • From Felipe Pepe, we get RPG Maker: History & Games, self-described as "A look at the last three decades of this legendary indie dev tool". A lot of things I didn't know are in there.
  • Last but not least, this December, the Digital Antiquarian tackles Might and Magic. No wonder he needed an extra week to start.

That said, I'm sick and tired of art snobbery. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House was a grand creative statement that sparked a revolution in architecture, but it was also completely uninhabitable. The homes we live in are still boringly box-shaped a century later, even as reinforced concrete lets us build pretty much anything we want. Why? Because boxes work.

Well, so does competently executed entertainment that doesn't try to win any awards.

To avoid ending on a sour note: there's a new Basic for 8-bit micros out there, that can compile for multiple target platforms from one source, via tools like cc65 or z88dk. That could be good news, especially for fans of 6502-based platforms; the Speccy already had good tools.

But this is all for mid-December. See you on Christmas, when we say good bye.


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Tags: programming, retrogaming, game design, history, tools